Review: In ‘Crown Heights,’ a wrongful conviction in Brooklyn
Matt Ruskin’s “Crown Heights” takes its name from the Brooklyn neighborhood, but its story is both more pointedly individual and more broadly national than that suggests.
It’s a sober recounting of a case of wrongful conviction. Colin Warner (Lakeith Stanfield) is a Trinidad-born 18-year-old from Crown Heights, a traditional bastion of Caribbean immigrants. He’s arrested in April 1980 for a murder in neighboring Flatbush. Warner isn’t a saint — he’s shown stealing a car earlier in the day — but he had nothing to do with the crime, and doesn’t even know the people involved.
Warner’s jail term stretches more than two decades. The years, as marked in “Crown Heights,” peel away like boxing round cards in a bludgeoning fight that just won’t end. The tale of Warner’s misfortune dovetails throughout with the obsessed efforts of a childhood friend, Carl King (Nnamdi Asomugha, the former star NFL cornerback) to free him. More than one life is wrecked by injustice.